This Autonomous ‘Cyber Garden’ Can Roll Its Way to the Perfect Plot

If you don’t know much about plant care and find it very difficult to keep plants alive, this architectural concept might appeal to you.

Architects have found a way to give power to the plants. Plants are kept in a sphere that contains 12 garden modules and have electronics that enable them to find their own resources.

Called ‘hortcum machina, B,’ the sphere was created by William Victor Camilleri and Danilo Sampaio from the Bartlett School of Architecture at the University College London. It makes use of a series of sensors which help in monitoring a plant’s electrophysiology, and provides them a primitive form of ‘intelligence.’

Plants can sense and decide whether the environmental conditions are favorable for them or not, and if required, they can move to a new location.

The team explained, “Its core of twelve garden modules, each carrying native British species on outwardly-extending linear actuators allow the structure to become mobile by shifting its centre-of-gravity. Electro-physiological sensing of the state of individual plants collectively and democratically controls decision-making of the orientation of the structure and its mobility.”

The team described that “in the near future context of driverless cars, autonomous flying vehicles, and seemingly endless other forms of intelligent robotics cohabitating, our built environment, ‘hortcum machina B,’ is a speculative cyber-gardener.”

Nidhi Goyal

Nidhi is a gold medalist Post Graduate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. You can also find Nidhi on Google+.